The hypocrisy of selective outrage: A tale of two crises — Che Ran

MAY 25 — If Donald Trump wants to play the saviour of civilisation, he’d do well to start with a globe, a highlighter, and a mirror. The former president — whose flair for fire-starting tweets outpaces his appetite for facts — recently blew the dog whistle loud enough to wake apartheid’s ghost, claiming a “white genocide” is unfolding in South Africa. And just like that, a discredited conspiracy theory got a second life in the limelight.

Let’s unpack that.

Between January and March 2025, six farm murders were recorded in South Africa. Five of those victims were Black, one was white. In the previous quarter, out of 12 farm murders, only one victim was white. These aren’t isolated numbers. Year after year, the data shows a consistent pattern: farm attacks affect all races. White farmers are not being uniquely targeted by marauding mobs in a racially charged purge. The South African Police Service no longer publishes detailed racial data on farm attacks, but independent groups and researchers confirm the same trend. The real story is a tragedy of crime, poverty, and land inequities — ugly, complex, but far from the genocidal fairytale Trump peddles.

But nuance doesn’t trend. And Trump isn’t trying to understand South Africa; he’s trying to light a fuse under white nationalist sentiment in his own backyard. In that fever dream, every white man in khakis tending a plot in Limpopo becomes a martyr, and every Black South African becomes a suspect.

Let’s talk real genocide.

Since October 7, 2023, Israeli military operations in Gaza have resulted in the deaths of over 45,000 Palestinians—more than 13,000 of them children. That’s not a typo. That’s thirteen thousand children, reduced to ash and rubble under an airstrike campaign funded, in part, by your American tax dollars. Trump, who poured billions into Israeli military aid, didn’t tweet about that. He didn’t ask Netanyahu to exercise restraint. He didn’t blink.

Take the story of Dr. Alaa al-Najjar, a pediatrician who spent her days trying to keep Gaza’s children alive. On May 24, 2025, she was at the Nasser Medical Complex when an Israeli airstrike hit her home in Khan Younis. Nine of her ten children were killed. Her husband and one surviving child were wounded. She returned home to a pile of limbs and rubble. This wasn’t an accident. This wasn’t an outlier. This is policy.

The International Criminal Court recently issued arrest warrants for top Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, citing crimes against humanity and war crimes. The list includes the use of starvation as a weapon of war, targeting civilian infrastructure, and indiscriminate bombing. The United Nations estimates that 70 per cent of the dead in Gaza are women and children. Hospitals have been hit. Refugee camps. Schools. Aid convoys. And still, the bombs fall.

Every 10 minutes, a child dies in Gaza. You want to talk about ethnic cleansing, Mr Trump? Look east. Not south.

Meanwhile, in South Africa, farm attacks are being committed by the desperate, the dispossessed, the criminal — not by political death squads out to erase an entire race. South Africa’s crime problem is immense, and yes, white farmers — like Black farmers, workers, women, and children — are at risk. But to reduce that to a genocide narrative is not just lazy, it’s dangerous. It pours gasoline on the already smoldering tensions in a country still reeling from apartheid’s long shadow.

Trump’s sudden concern for South African farmers is not born of compassion. It’s performative rage — crafted to stoke the fears of his base, who find comfort in the fantasy of white victimhood. Meanwhile, actual victims lie in Gaza’s graveyards, often unidentified, wrapped in white shrouds, their names lost to debris and dust.

Where’s the outrage for Amal, age six, who died of thirst because Israel bombed the water infrastructure and blocked aid from entering? Where’s the Fox News panel discussing Yahya, age ten, buried alive under a collapsed school where he once drew pictures of the sea? Where are the Congressional hearings on the fact that Israel’s war has displaced nearly two million people from Gaza, half of them children, with nowhere to go?

Instead, we get political theater. Trump wants us to believe he’s the last line of defence against some fantasy Marxist plot to wipe out white farmers. It’s pure fiction. The farm murder rate in South Africa has actually decreased over the last decade. If anything, white farmers — who still own more than 70 per cent of privately held farmland in the country — have institutional power, financial resources, and security networks that their Black rural counterparts can only dream of.

This is not to dismiss the pain of any family who’s lost someone to violence. No death should be diminished. But perspective matters. Proportion matters. And priorities — well, they matter most of all.

Donald Trump, and those who parrot his rhetoric, want you to believe that genocide is color-coded. That when white bodies fall, the world must stop and weep. But when brown and Black children are torn apart by drone strikes and bombs — funded by American aid, justified by geopolitical excuses — they look away.

You want to impress us, Mr Trump? Call out your own bloody legacy. Speak up about the 13,000 Palestinian children who will never grow old, never play football, never go to school, never get to speak their truth. Speak up about Dr. al-Najjar, who will spend every waking hour haunted by the laughter she’ll never hear again.

Don’t insult our intelligence with your selective grief. Don’t weaponise South Africa’s pain to distract from Gaza’s horror. If you truly care about human life, then start with the lives your country helped destroy.

Until then, keep your outrage. We’ve buried enough of it.

*This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.